From the beginning of her career, Joan Jonas has investigated “elemental media” such as air, water, and earth. Her practice recalls a distinctive form of media-reflexivity associated with early modern practices of magic, which embraced the agency and performativity of these natural materialities. Jonas is a media artist in the fullest sense of the word: not merely an early adopter of the video camera and other technical devices, but a poetic alchemist of media in their deep history.

Tekyeh Dowlat, once a major center for ta’ziyeh performances, has been subject to speculative claims regarding its construction date, location, and alleged European influence. Contrary to claims that it was modeled after London’s Royal Albert Hall following Naser al-Din Shah’s 1873 CE trip to Europe, newly examined Qajar-era documents, including the Shah’s diaries, confirm that its architectural plan was finalized in 1870 CE. A critical examination of historical records corrects persistent myths surrounding its origins, structure, and legacy.

Comparing the use of masks and other face coverings in the “mystery plays” of medieval England and taʿziyeh-khani, the Shiʿi form of devotional drama, reveals similar anxieties and impulses surrounding representation of the holy. In performance, what can or must not be shown of divinity? Is the (new) 21st-century inclination toward veiling the faces of holy characters in the taʿziyeh restrictive or an analogue display of divine resplendence? Comparison with the Christian medieval tradition affords a nuanced understanding.

A key figure of the urban turn in 1990s Chinese art, Cao Fei is primarily known for her experimentation with virtual worlds to create futuristic techno-fantasies of urban life. However, Cao’s decades-long interest in dance marks an overlooked dimension of her engagement with the postsocialist Chinese city. Video works feature spontaneous dancing by amateurs in unlikely urban spaces that disrupt and transform the spatial logic imposed by China’s reform-era city planning.

Photographs are meant not just to be seen but also gifted. Father David Roney, a sexually abusive priest, moved from Minnesota to Guatemala in 1994 with his camera to minister to a remote Indigenous community, becoming the primary author of its visual history by gifting thousands of photographs. Roney’s performative generosity allowed those living in poverty to attain a visual record of their lives, but his gifts came with reciprocal obligations.

Contemporary Japanese poet Yoshimasu Gōzō’s voice in his live performances exemplifies “in-betweenness,” ma in Japanese, literally an interval between two things—both spatially and temporally. In Yoshimasu’s poetic “radio play,” this interval is between the human voice and the electric sound produced by the radio and other machines. The sonorous body of the poet mobilizes all senses in the acoustic space of the performance and corporealizes sound into a haptic expression of the poetic spirit.

Cognitive Motions (CM) is an Afroreferenced Practice as Research methodology anchored on the scholarship of Congolese philosopher B. Fu-Kiau. This approach operationalizes the Bantu-Kongo cosmogram (Dikenga) and distills synthetic ideograms from philosophical principles as tools for investigative improvisation and dismantling the colonial “monoculture of thought” ingrained in our sensorial and neuromuscular systems.

Subversive acts can resist systems of dominion through disoriented, peripheral practices and anarchist cosmologies. In Hobart, Tasmania, anarchist DJ Astro Labe head-butted Tony Abbott, former prime minister of Australia. His act of guerrilla theatre defies conventional frameworks and demands new interpretive tools.

From schoolroom reenactments of the Constitutional Convention to in-Congress readings and Broadway shows, performance comprises a crucial mechanism by which laypeople in the US understand “constitutionality”—the practices, laws, and actions permissible within the US political arena. These performances illustrate that constitutionality is not simply a set of legal procedures and concepts defined by a document, but a cultural field of which legal practices are one pillar. They also clarify how constitutional protections have come to be abrogated in their own name, and urgently call for intervention.

On 1 November 2024, a concrete and steel canopy at a newly reconstructed railway station in the Serbian city of Novi Sad collapsed, instantly killing 14 passersby, with two more succumbing to injuries in the following weeks. Many citizens saw this as the outcome of rampant government corruption and staged silent vigils for the victims. In response to the regime’s violent crackdown on a vigil in front of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, students went into blockade, a protest performance that soon spread to all state universities in the country.

Two new titles from leading scholars, in quite different ways, suggest that the era of mass politics has had an enduring effect upon performance in theory and practice.